All Posts by jerry hildenbrand

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Imagine a small projector attached to your Android device, and you can use your hand and touch the projected image to navigate the UI through a Kinect attached to a PC. There's no need to just imagine it any longer, as the Android Kinect Projector Interface project is doing it now. The developers have built a system where a projector is attached to a Galaxy...

The ASUS Transformer Prime is the first quad-core tablet, and users were a bit up in arms when it was discovered that the bootloader was locked. ASUS responded with an official statement that a tool to unlock the bootloader was in development, and today their official Twitter account told everyone that it would be coming in February:
Of course, you'll be voiding your warranty and all that good...

Lookout has released a neat new application this morning -- Mobile Threat Tracker. What it does is tell you where and when users running Lookout have came across malware in their mobile devices. How it does it is the cool part -- the results are updated hourly, and when you start the app you get an animated timeline where individual malware "hits" are represented as tiny shafts of light zooming...

You guys probably know this by now, but I was a fan of App Inventor. Watching my wife use it to create her own application just sucked me in, and I loved the whole idea of a way for anyone to make an Android app. When we heard that Google was shutting it down, I was sad, but the news that MIT was going to pick up the pieces and run with it lifted my spirits again. Recent news makes me even...

The folks at Dolphin Browser, one of the most popular third party browsers for Android devices, have unveiled two new add-ons today -- Skitch and Evernote. Both integrate seamlessly with the Dolphin Browser app, and look to be simple and elegant. We love simple, especially when paired with elegant. Using them is easy enough -- when you come across a page you'd like to share you just tap the...

Google Music has been updated to version 4.1.512, bringing fixes to shuffle mode and fixes for folks using multiple Google accounts. The update looks to be across the board for all devices running Android 2.2 or higher, so be sure to check and see if your copy is up-to-date. We love Google Music around here, and on devices without removable storage it's a life saver. Hit the break for the...

We're back for the second weekly Android Central photo contest, and this week's theme is transportation. Anything that you use to get from point A to point B is fair game (see our example photo above), and we're looking forward to seeing another round of great pictures from you guys and gals. Come Sunday, we'll pick the cream of the crop and show them all off (check out last week's finalists,...

What is a kernel? If you spend any time reading Android forums, blogs, how-to posts or online discussion you'll soon hear people talking about the kernel. A kernel isn't something unique to Android -- iOS and MacOS have one, Windows has one, BlackBerry's QNX has one, in fact all high level operating systems have one. The one we're interested in is Linux, as it's the one Android uses. Let's...

If you're an Android hacker or developer, you know about BusyBox. For the lay-people among us, it's a utility that extends the limited commands provided by the Android toolkit in the shell -- copying and renaming files, reading and writing data, that sort of thing. Here's a chance to learn a little more, as Stephen Erickson has open-sourced his BusyBox installer application. A look at the...

The winner of this week's Android Central photo contest is Travis Detweiler with his picture of sunrise over Tampa Bay. Taken with his HTC EVO 3D while heading out into the gulf to catch a few Amberjack and Grouper. Travis says he didn't use any particular camera app or effects, just the camera as-is on his 3VO. He captured the theme and framed the perfect shot. Congrats, Travis!
We had well...

If you're a dyed-in-the-wool modder, here's a great weekend project -- modifying your Verizon Galaxy Nexus to work with the HP Touchstone. I'll tell you right up front -- this one isn't for the faint-hearted. It involves breaking the case open and voiding your warranty. But AC member ohiomoto has a beautiful step-by-step to guide you through, and there's no need for a soldering iron. Things...

Motorola has made an official request for "Pre-release software testers" of an unknown update for the Motorola Photon 4G. This is standard practice for Motorola, who likes to slowly roll out their final builds to a select few in what they call a "soak test". This gives Motorola (and the carriers) a bigger set of eyeballs looking for any potential bugs that limited internal testing just didn't...

I'm a sucker for daily deals sites, and had to pass this one along. A 32GB Acer Iconia A500 (one of our top picks of last year) for just under $300 bucks is nothing to sneeze at. We know the next generations of tablets and quad-core is coming soon, but the A500 is still a hell of a tablet and this is a hell of a price. If you're in the market for a new tablet, or just want to window-shop,...

The Samsung Galaxy Note that we already know is coming to AT&T, has passed through the FCC. There's absolutely no surprises -- we see the 21Mbps UMTS/HSPA+, GSM 850/1900, and band 4 and 17 LTE radios, along with NFC, Wifi and Bluetooth. Now all we need to know is when the SGH-i717 will go up for sale -- all we've officially heard is "the coming weeks". Even though it's not a surprise, we'...

What is the JIT? JIT stands for "Just In Time," and we use it to describe a Dalvik JIT compiler, which was added to Android with the 2.2 release. It compiles bytecode into native machine code at runtime. Essentially it takes the code for an app, analyzes it and converts it into something that runs faster. It does all this while the application is running, and that's where the "just in time"...

Sprint has over-the-air updates scheduled to roll out beginning today for the HTC EVO 4G, the Samsung Epic 4G, and the EVO Design 4G. Using the opportunity presented by removing Carrier IQ, Sprint has bundled up a few other fixes for these handsets and the OTA updates, beginning today, should be 100 percent complete in 10 days. The update information is as follows:
EVO 4G
Update to...

This is getting interesting. After the recent news that federal testing determined LightSquared's LTE network plans would never work without interfering with GPS (and a cease to any further testing) LightSquared has come back with guns blazing. In a statement, the company has accused the GPS industry of rigging the results by using antiquated equipment, shrouding the entire process in secrecy...

The ASUS Transformer Prime is getting another OTA this evening, and reports say that the GPS is working much better. If you recall, there has been issues surrounding the aluminum casing and GPS signal with the Prime, and ASUS was said to be investigating. We've confirmed that there's a new build version number (IML74K.US_epad-9.4.2.11-20120117) as well as an update to the GPS software bringing...

Both the Samsung Epic 4G and the Samsung Epic 4G Touch have new kernel source up at Samsung's open source portal. The Original Epic 4G has the kernel and other open-source bits for update version EL30 ready to download, and the Epic 4G Touch has the same for version EL29.
Usually when we see source code up for grabs at Samsung, it's soon followed by an OTA update. We've heard rumors of both...

We were pretty sure that kicking off a weekly photo contest would be well received, but we had no idea it would be this well received. Combine our level of awesome with your level of awesome, and I'm buried under a mountain of hundreds of beautiful pictures to sort through. So many that I'm going to need an extra day to give them all the attention they deserve.
The new cutoff time is Midnight...

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